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ThinSkin writes "Meet the fit-PC, a tiny 4.7 x 4.5 x 1.5-inch PC that only draws 5-watts, consuming in a day less power than a traditional PC consumes in one hour. By today's standards, the fit-PC has very little horsepower, which makes it apt for web browsing and light applications; today's games need not apply. Loyd Case over at ExtremeTech reviews the fit-PC and puts it through its paces, noting that performance is not this PC's strength, but rather its small size and price tag of $285."

*rolls eyes*
If anything in the slashdot comments can still hurt his feelings then he doesn't read them often enough.. in fact if anything on the internet can still hurt his feelings then he's just a pansy

I'm looking at the many potential possibilities for wearable computing, and this is a major thing for me. 5 watts means that batteries last forever, and that heat will be low. Small form factor means that it could easily be converted into something that you just take with you. Freedom of OS means that I can pick whatever will have the best drivers for the most peripherals.

I'm all sorts of interested in this, especially with that kind of price point.

This is the sort of place where one takes hardware; those who come here appreciate this. Cool bit of kit, cheap yet capable. Machines this small, versatile and low cost? You could make a garage door opener out of this. You could fly a UAV on 5W.

Apparently they were confused about the Gentoo... TFA says it actually shipped with Ubuntu instead. Probably a good idea since Gentoo peeps would probably rather customize it from the start anyhow, and Ubuntu is easier for the less techie of us.

I had been wondering when a tiny computer with 2 ethernet ports and decent CPU would come out... Too bad I've not got a router I really like and no real reason to mess with it now.

I sure would like an extra ethernet port on it, though. Would make a GREAT 3 homed firewall box so I can use the box I've got as my router/firewall/dns/dhcp server for something real (it is, after all a low end first gen p4, it could server SOMETHING).

Ooh, I have one of these, and it's kind of a mixed bag. The people who make them don't really seem to have enough Linux experience to really set this thing up so that it makes sense out of the box, definitely buy it only if you're planning to reinstall Linux on it.

I expected at least a serial terminal out of the box so that I wouldn't have to plug in a display. It has an RS232 port (via RJ11 jack and adapter cable), and it is a semi-embedded little box. However they didn't enable it in/etc/inittab. Damn. On to Ethernet though, surely it ships with an ssh server running out of the box? Nope. On to plugging in a keyboard and display...

It does come with Gentoo out of the box (not sure why they picked that distribution), with KDE (ugh) and some various other software. I used UNetbootin (http://lubi.sourceforge.net/unetbootin.html) to install Ubuntu via the network, because the BIOS that shipped on my Fit-PC didn't have working PXE boot (they've since fixed that). Afterward, I enabled the serial console and SSH server, configured the network interfaces, installed the applications I needed (SVN server) and stashed the Fit-PC somewhere and forgot about it, as I had originally intended.

Overall, I like the Fit-PC, but I wish they had taken more care with the out-of-box experience and even the PC itself (the reset button, for example, is not exposed, and there's no soft-power way to shut the thing off since it has no other buttons). I do like the dual network interfaces, RS232, and low power and quiet operation, but there are tons of other similar Geode-based boxes out there, so this isn't too unique.

Finally, the Geode is going away. I wonder what the next semi-embedded x86 chip of choice will be.

I understood that perfectly, however, it is still interesting to compare the two. They share quite a bit of hardware, even though they are for completely different applications. The processors differ by a speed grade, and they have the same amount of RAM. Where the XO-1 has wifi, the fit-pc has 2 ethernet ports. I'd guess the wifi probably costs a bit more. The XO-1 has 1Gb flash, whereas the fit-pc has a 40Gb hard drive. Again, I'd wager the flash is a bit more expensive than the hard drive. And when you a

Why? What Internet connection do you have that would come close to maxing out even a 10Mb connection? How many hundreds of machines do you have on your home network that would requires a Gigabit on the inside port?

PCs come with Gigabit Ethernet connections these days because the cost difference is negligible. Having two 100MB ports provides more than enough bandwidth for average home use and may save some power which is the point of this machine.

flash (ssds) uses less power than harddisks. you don't need to spin flash memories while you are not reading them, or move other mechanical parts while reading.
see e.g. http://www.sandisk.com/Corporate/PressRoom/PressReleases/PressRelease.aspx?ID=3732 [sandisk.com]
"Power efficiency. SanDisk SSDs have minimal power requirements, with savings rated at over 50 percent compared with a hard disk drive -- 0.9 watts during active operation versus 1.9 watts7."

I've worked with these Geode-based 'miniboxes' during my day job for the past year or so. Max power draw is more than 5W, but it's not as bad as you make it. The Geode's TDP is 3.5W IIRC, though in average (i.e. not encoding video) use it's more like 1.0-1.5W. The HDD draws ~2.5W while seeking, but 1W while it's idle. The RAM + other goodies on the motherboard are ~1.5W. Even if you plugged in 5W of USB devices you'd still be looking at a total power draw of 10W under all but the heaviest loads. Measured at the wall it's a little higher due to PSU efficiency, but nowhere near the 2x factor you claim - more like 30%.

That website is hideous....whoever designed it should be fired. I am interested in buying it, but I don't even want to hit the button to see the next page.....can't we have a link to an all in one print page ?

If you're not interested in the current layout, where 1.5 pages of content (printed) is expanded across four separate web pages, with a layout/ads/bullshit to content ratio of about 5, try the printable version [extremetech.com]—the web's best kept secret.

my movie playing pc is running on 196 mb and xubuntu, runs ok. if anything i'd say the processor is a bit slow for movies though, my last attempt at a tv box was a 466 and i couldn't get it to play movies without choppyness, even when i went back to win95 with the fastest codecs i could find (admittedly with this config it was *almost* there).

Laptops are really really cheap these days. I bought an Acer laptop for a family member, brand new from CompUSA, last month for $350 (It has an Intel CPU I forget which one). It will probably run circles around this thing and costs about the same (once you include the $40 shipping cost on fit PC) and consumes little additional power.

I agree. I bought a $CDN 450 laptop a couple months ago. Loaded Mandriva on it and it runs very snappy. When I'm running under a regular load it consumes about 20 watts. That's for a 1.6 GHz P IV Celeron, with an Intel 950 GMA. Much more useful than what you get with this fit PC. Plus you can bring a laptop with you, and use it at the coffee shop and such. I don't imagine you can do the same with this one.

This device would actually make a decent firewall. Likely your laptop doesn't have two ethernet ports. And a WRT54 doesn't have a 40 GB hard drive for logging. Throw on SmoothWall or DansGuardian and you have a low power box that sits between the cable/DSL modem and your home network. Seems like a good fit to me. Another poster points out that it would be even better with three ethernet ports, for a DMZ. I don't know how much a WRT54 would cost if they added a 40 GB laptop drive, but I think this is probabl

Well there you go - that was easy. And, you'd have a built in keyboard. At my house, the cable modem is sitting in the printer stand next to the ethernet switch. So for me, I'd just as soon have a small box sans LCD and keyboard. But sure, you make a good point that a laptop could be a fine firewall, cheap. And the built-in battery means a clean shutdown when the UPS signals the power has gone out.

Now that you mention it, a UPS is another separate thing you don't need if you use a laptop. It'll run for several hours with the lid closed and automatically suspend when the battery gets too low. Recently some goober at work blipped the power without warning anybody because he was installing some equipment, and everybody not on a laptop lost their work. (Granted they should have been using UPSs).

The Core 2 Duo U2000 series are 1.06-1.20 GHz single-core CPUs that are rated at 5.5 watts TDP. That's a little more than the Geode, but the C2D U2000 will absolutely run circles around the K7 Tbred-based Geode. I'd think that a U2000 with a low-power chipset like the 945GMS (yes I know, terrible graphics compared to the AMD unit's...) would do a tad better.

Exactly. I picked up a Dell laptop with a broken screen for a song to replace a desktop that's on 24x7. Dropped in a 60GB drive, turned on noatime, and consumption is only 13W with the lid closed (12W once the drive spins down.) And that's at 1.2GHz; I can turn it down for even more savings if necessary.

I was researching this the other day. I was trying to find a replacement for my VIA EPIA SP8000E (it's a piece of junk; almost everything causes it to freeze or not boot).Requirements: Low power consumption. Low noise. Enough juice to run a decent web browser. Linux-compatible. Cheap.

Being fed up with VIA, I first looked to laptops. Power consumption about 20 Watts, good. Need to be a bit more careful about the noise, but you can find quiet laptops no problem. Any laptop probably smokes the SP8000E performa

Given it's stuck at 256MB RAM - which is sad. It's got a few other downsides like probably some bottleneck somewhere beween IO and the CPU. But it only draws 5 Watts and needs no active cooling which is really cool. Considering that this is a small company and they manage to offer their micropc for such a low price it is a really interesting device. 5 Watts... my Eco-Bulb in my desklamp uses 7. Quite awesome actually.

800Mhz is plenty when you have (relatively) huge caches and fast RAM, as well as the headroom of being able to triple your speed on demand. Have you tried actually limiting the Athlon to 800Mhz? You'll start noticing some really long pauses, especially if you take out all but one of your RAM modules. With a 500Mhz P3 and more 384Mb RAM, Firefox is sluggish even on simple web sites.

Do yourselves a favor and get a VIA-based mini-itx board for that kind of money.

Seems you can get a VB7001G (1.5Ghz) for about $130; add in $30 for 512MB of ram (2x the fitPC), and however much you feel like spending on a compactflash card, USB memory key, or smaller laptop drive. Say, $50 for a 60GB drive (more than the fitPC's 40). $40 for a picoPSU; $30 for a AC adapter. Buy a crap case for $30 if you don't have one you can use already. Install a gigabit NIC for under $20 (dunno if there are any cheap dual-interface gigabit NICs.) That's under $310, and quite a bit more bang for the buck. It probably won't be 5w, but it'll be well under 20w given that board seems to use about 10w.

If you want to go even cheaper, intel is fighting back against via, like with the D201GLY. It's $70, 1.3ghz celeron, DDR2 ram...

http://www.fit-pc.com/shipping-cost.htm/ [fit-pc.com] says that the shipping cost is $40 first unit in North America, $20 in Israel, $60 in Europe, and $80 in other locations, plus $10/15/5/20 per additional unit in the same categories.

wonder how well this would do in a car install. Use a smaller lcd touchscreen, hook up a gps thingie and i guess you are set? This way you can find your way around town or watch porn and crash your car at the same time!

To me, the slight differences in watt consumption aren't the point, for my uses anyway. What I want is a fanless PC. With ethernet and a decent soundcard, and a PII/500MHz or faster, 256MB RAM, and maybe 1GB Flash, and a USB slot. I don't even need VGA: machines for display should be faster and beefier. And of course it should run Linux.

That gumstix looked cool. Are there more or better in its class, preferably under $150?

Thanks, that's a decent approximation. However, it costs $249 if you don't subscribe to their Internet service (their real business), or $338 if you subscribe and immediately cancel [zonbu.com], while the service costs $13:mo for 2 years minimum (cancelable) prepaid.

It's also kind of overkill for my app. It's got a bunch of SW preloaded, which has some kind of cost in installation/maintenance even if it's FOSS. It's got QXGA display, which I don't need, kbd/mouse ports (in addition to USB), and the 4GB Flash is costs a

Soekris [soekris.com] has a whole lineup of single-board machines with this processor. The prices are pretty reasonable, and they have cases and a some accessories. Netgate [netgate.com] makes wireless hardware kits for Soekris aystems. Soekris made the hardware for the MIT RoofNet project.

Comrade! We have detected you using mathematics and logic to stop an anti-Apple tirade! Please be advised: this is Slashdot. Apple sells only massively overpriced hardware. Pointing out that Apple sells something equivalent to its actual value, instead of the fantasy-land price that internet geeks believe it should cost (id est, free) is double-plus-ungood. We here at the Ministry for Nerdy Indignation hope that you will reconsider your eminently logical position and join with us in our outrage that Apple does not price their products at Mom's Basement prices. Thank you.

Comrade! We have detected you using mathematics and logic to stop an anti-Apple tirade! Please be advised: this is Slashdot. Apple sells only massively overpriced hardware. Pointing out that Apple sells something equivalent to its actual value, instead of the fantasy-land price that internet geeks believe it should cost (id est, free) is double-plus-ungood. We here at the Ministry for Nerdy Indignation hope that you will reconsider your eminently logical position and join with us in our outrage that Apple does not price their products at Mom's Basement prices. Thank you.

The Mac Mini uses 110W, the fit-PC uses 5W, the Mac Mini is 6.5x6.5x2 inches, the fit-PC is 4.2x4.2x1.5 inches, the Mac Mini is produced on a relatively massive scale compared to the fit-PC, the Mac Mini works at 10-35C, the fit-PC works at 0-70C.

If you're comparing them based on the amount of RAM or processor speed you're being a little less than "eminently logical".

My PPC 1.25 ghz G4 Mac Mini draws ~14W at idle and ~31W when its CPU is maxed about by distributed.net RC5 client. I measured this w/my Kill A Watt (http://www.p3international.com/products/special/P4400/P4400-CE.html).

Don't get me wrong, I think the Fit-PC is an interesting and has its uses but, in my opinion, saying it's cheaper compared to the Mac Mini misses the point altogether.

Mac Mini starts at $599, fit-PC starts at $285. Fit-PC is cheaper, period. No "point" to be missed; one is cheaper than the other.

What you seem to be trying to say is that Mac Mini is better value for money, but value depends on what you're using it for.

If you need the lowest possible power consumption, space, and the widest range of operating temperatures, then Fit-PC is better value for money.
If you need a normal PC for regular users, but you want to think that it's a special PC for special users,

So go to MadTux [madtux.org] and get a real PC for less. 512MB of RAM, 16x DVD+-RW, 80 GB hard drive, Vector Linux installed, and 60 days of email support for $281.99 with a Sempron 3000+.

There are other models and they can all be configured somewhat, too. What you get from MadTux is bigger and uses more power, but it's a lot more computer for the money. It's also vastly more expandable.

If you really need silent, low-power, and small, this FitPC is quicker than building your own EPIA case but not as fun. There are lots

Definitely. Though for many broadband setups you do not need the second ether because you can use a PPTP, PPPoE or L2TP relay if supported on the modem.

As far as the article is concerned it is a demo how not to use such a system. What a bunch of clueless wankers.

Xterm, pulseaudio (reminds me I should put the instructions for setting it on my website) and run the damn thing diskless booting over the network. All of my machines in the house run this way booting of a dedicated server which holds the disk space and runs the applications. Even the laptop when in the house is booted this way and not off its own disk. As a result even something as slow as a Transmeta @800 or Via@400 is more than enough. My firewall and my development boxes also operate this way. I have used this approach for nearly 5 years now and while it takes some effort to setup the maintenance is many times less compared to anything else. You set it once and after that it just works.

Idle on a laptop hard drive is typically around 0.5-1W, peaking at 2-3W during writes. Spin up could consume 5W on its own, albeit briefly. The CPU only uses 0.9W, so I don't think 5W would be an unreasonable number for normal operation.

Actually, the iPhone or the iPod Touch might be a closer comparison imho. The 5watt PC is a good deal less powerful (in both senses of the word) than the mac mini.

Of course, I know which one I'd take, if given the choice. For my money, getting a 5w computer is kinda pointless when I'm expected to hook it up to a desktop LCD which could easily use more than 10 times that much power.

I am curious to see how you can use this tiny PC as a phone, or at least how in the world you can use it by carrying around like a phone. You don;t seem to realize that with that PC you also need to carry around a monitor, a keyboard and mouse.

Very Limited indeed. With the PC you can edit documents, add applications, "copy and paste". Things (among many others) you can't do with the Apples. The iPhone/iPod touch aren't really proper computers just for this reason.
So again, why comparing those things together? I still don't get the comparison.

Yeah, i see what you're saying, it's impossible to use less electricity so why bother trying! there's no point using fluorescent lights, cause that power will be sucked up by my tv anyway! there's no point getting an efficient car cause some fucking soccer mom is driving an suv! and so on.

Think the FitPC would be a much better fit to what I want in a small form factor X86 box for a bit less than what a similar Mini-ITX system goes for. The FitPC appears to consume less power than the lowest power Mini-ITX systems - should be able to get several hours of run-time off of a motorcycle battery.

Compiling a kernel wouldn't be too bad on the fit-pc. It can be done in under 30min on a pc with half the performance. However, given the lack of RAM and how slow the hard drive is, building glibc and gcc would take days, and things like GNOME and KDE would be worse than most slashdotters would joke about.

Actually, yes, because it is a lightweight PC. If you bother to read the article, you'll see that the company provides Windows drivers and you can indeed install Windows on it. The point of the device is not gaming though, it's light internet use or any of a dozen other things small-form-factor computers are good for.

And yes, I know you were trolling, but I can never resist feeding them these days.

I recently built a mini itx system based around a via 1.5 ghz processor to do the same basic tasks the fit-pc is designed to handle. The fit isnt a bad box, it's just that it isn't really anythything new or innovative. Looks to me like they took a pico-itx board, slapped on a laptop hard disk and called it a system. The price is good for the size, but you can build a system with a way better processor, more ram and add a CF to IDE adapter so you can go without moving parts.

It seems to be overlooked by most people, but the fact that this little box is fanless means the laptop harddrive contains the only moving parts. I'm not sure if it would be a good idea, but this might be a good candidate for a cheap air tight sealed industrial-environment box.